Abstract
Rita Azevedo Gomes’ Correspondências (2016) draws on the epistolary correspondence between Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Jorge de Sena, as well as their respective poetic works, to build an epistolary-poetic, audio-visual and sensory-emotional kaleidoscope based on their reading, recitation and representation in different languages. In this way, the filmmaker generates a kind of phenomenology of reception that uses all the audiovisual possibilities: the different formats, digital and analogue; their multiple textures; and the diverse options of the texts’ enunciation. The experimentation with different combinations, also using various image and sound effects, materialises in an epistolary-poetic essay film which reflects on the aesthetic experience and attains a hybrid, complex image defining contemporary cinema: between person and character, diegesis and extradiegesis, digital and analogue images, voice-in and voiceover, private and public, life and work, present and past, absence and presence, that is, between reproduction and representation. Azevedo’s essayistic reflection on creation, exile and absence is generated through parataxic thinking and interstitial thinking that create dialectical and symbolic sentence-images. Thus, Correspondências becomes an avant-garde expression of both contemporary epistolary cinema and contemporary essay film.
Highlights
Rita Azevedo Gomes is one of the most innovative and international filmmakers of contemporary Portuguese cinema, whose work belongs almost completely to the 21st century
Her last film, Danses macabres, squelettes et autres fantasies (2019), codirected with Pierre Léon and Jean-Louis Schefer, follows the phenomenology approach of Correspondências to build another experience about artistic reception but in this case about image in general and painting in particular
The epistolary film reaches its literary model and the film is enunciated through the letters of different people or characters. Starting from this premise, contemporary cinema generates filmic experiences of great interest (Monterrubio 2019b), which are placed in the hybridisation between fiction and non-fiction, such as From Hetty to Nancy (Deborah Stratman, 1997), Endless Dreams and Water Between (Renée Green, 2009) or Redemption (Miguel Gomes, 2013)
Summary
Rita Azevedo Gomes is one of the most innovative and international filmmakers of contemporary Portuguese cinema, whose work belongs almost completely to the 21st century. The epistolary film reaches its literary model and the film is enunciated through the letters of different people or characters In this sense, and starting from this premise, contemporary cinema generates filmic experiences of great interest (Monterrubio 2019b), which are placed in the hybridisation between fiction and non-fiction, such as From Hetty to Nancy (Deborah Stratman, 1997), Endless Dreams and Water Between (Renée Green, 2009) or Redemption (Miguel Gomes, 2013). Contemporary Essay Film Correspondências is built through the epistolary exchange of two great Portuguese authors, Jorge de Sena and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, both crucial in 20th century Portuguese Poetry Their correspondence is caused by Sena’s exile in 1959, first to Brazil and to the United States, and lasts until his death in 1978. As will be analysed below, this reflection is generated through the hybridisation between diegetic and extradiegetic spaces
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